by Mike Ashley
JORDAN LOOKED UP from the log of the day’s transmissions and noted with annoyance that Treemonisha was lying with her legs half-buried in the computer console. He couldn’t decide why that bothered him so much, but it did. He walked over to her and kicked her in the face to get her attention, his foot sailing right through her as if she wasn’t there, which she wasn’t. He waited, tapping his foot, for her to notice it.
Twenty seconds later she jumped then looked sheepish.
“You blinked,” Jordan crowed. “You blinked. You owe me another five dollars.” Again he waited, not even conscious of waiting. After a year at the station he had reached the point where his mind simply edited out the twenty-second time-lag. Given the frantic pace of life at the station, there was little chance he would miss anything.
“All right, so I blinked. I’m getting tired of that game. Besides, all you’re doing is wiping out your old debts. You owe me . . . $455 now instead of $460.”
“You liked it well enough when you were winning,” he pointed out. “How else could you have gotten into me for that kind of money, with my reflexes?”
(Wait) “I think the totals show who has the faster reflexes. But I told you a week ago that I don’t appreciate being bothered when I’m reading.” She waved her fac-printed book, her thumb holding her place.
“Oh, listen to you. Pointing out to me what you don’t like, while you’re all spread out through my computer. You know that drives me up the wall.”
(Wait) She looked down at where her body vanished into the side of the computer, but instead of apologizing, she flared up.
“Well, so what? I never heard of such foolishness; walking around chalk marks on the floor all the time so I won’t melt into your precious furniture. Who ever heard of such . . .” She realized she was repeating herself. She wasn’t good at heated invective, but had been getting practice at improving it in the past weeks. She got up out of the computer and stood glowering at Jordan, or glowering at where he had been.
Jordan had quickly scanned around his floor and picked out an area marked off with black tape. He walked over to it and stepped over the lines and waited with his arms crossed, a pugnacious scowl on his face.
“How do you like that?” he spat out at her. “I’ve been very scrupulous about avoiding objects in your place. Chalk marks, indeed. If you used tape like I told you, you wouldn’t be rubbing them off all the time with that fat ass of yours.” But she had started laughing after her eyes followed to where he was now standing, and it soon got out of control. She doubled over, threatened to fall down she laughed so hard. He looked down and tried to remember what it was that the tape marked off at her place. Was that where she kept the toilet . . . ?
He jumped hastily out of the invisible toilet and was winding up a scathing remark, but she had stopped laughing. The remarks about the fat ass had reached her, and her reply had crawled back at the speed of light.
As he listened to her, he realized anything he could say would be superfluous; she was already as angry as she could be. So he walked over to the holo set and pressed a switch. The projection he had been talking to zipped back into the tank, to become a ten-centimeter angry figure, waving her arms at him.
He saw the tiny figure stride to her own set and slap another button. The tank went black. He noticed with satisfaction just before she disappeared that she had lost her place in the book.
Then, in one of the violent swings of mood that had been scaring him to death recently, he was desolately sorry for what he had done. His hands trembled as he pressed the call button, and he felt the sweat popping out on his forehead. But she wasn’t receiving.
“Great. One neighbor in half a billion kilometers, and I pick a fight with her.”
He got up and started his ritual hunt for a way of killing himself that wouldn’t be so grossly bloody that it would make him sick. Once again he came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything like that in the station.
“Why couldn’t they think of things like that?” he fumed. “No drugs, no poison gas, no nothing. Damn air system has so goddam many safeties on the damn thing I couldn’t raise the CO2 count in here if my life depended on it. Which it does. If I don’t find a painless way to kill myself, it’s going to drive me to suicide.”
He broke off, not only because he had played back that last rhetorical ramble, but because he was never comfortable hearing himself talk to himself. It sounded too much like a person on the brink of insanity.
“Which I am!”
It felt a bit better to have admitted it out loud. It sounded like a very sane thing to say. He gasped the feeling, built steadily on it until it began to feel natural. After a few minutes of deep breathing he felt something approximating calm. Calmly, he pressed the call button again, to find that Treemonisha was still not at home. Calmly, he built up spit and fired it at the innocent holo tank, where it dripped down obscenely. He grinned. Later he could apologize, but right now it seemed to be the right course to stay angry.
He walked back to the desk and sat down before the computer digest of the three trillion bits that had come over the Hotline in the last twenty-four hours. Here was where he earned his salary. There was an added incentive in the realization that Treemonisha had not yet started her scan of her own computer’s opinions for the day. Maybe he could scoop her again.
Jordan Moon was the station agent for Star Line, Inc., one of the two major firms in the field of interstellar communication. If you can call listening in on a party line communication.
He lived and worked in a station that had been placed in a slow circular orbit thirteen billion kilometers from the sun. It was a lonely area; it had the sole virtue of being right in the center of the circle of greatest signal strength of the Ophiuchi Hotline.
About all that anyone had ever known for sure about the Ophiuchites was the fact that they had one hell of a big laser somewhere in their planetary system, 70 Ophiuchi. Aside from that, which they couldn’t very well conceal, they were an extremely close-mouthed race. They never volunteered anything about themselves directly, and human civilization was too parsimonious to ask. Why build a giant laser, the companies asked when it was suggested, when all that lovely information floods through space for free?
Jordan Moon had always thought that an extremely good question, but he turned it around: why did the Ophiuchites bother to build a giant laser? What did they get out of it? No one had the slightest idea, not even Jordan, who fancied himself an authority on everything.
He was not far wrong, and that was his value to the company.
No one had yet succeeded in making a copyright stand up in court when applied to information received over the Hotline. The prevailing opinion was that it was a natural resource, like vacuum, and free to all who could afford the expense of maintaining a station in the cometary zone. The expense was tremendous, but the potential rewards were astronomical. There were fifteen companies elbowing each other for a piece of the action, from the giants like Star Line and HotLine, Ltd., down to several freelancers who paid holehunters to listen in when they were in the vicinity.
But the volume of transmissions was enough to make a board chairman weep and develop ulcers. And the aliens, with what the company thought was boorish inconsideration, insisted on larding the valuable stuff with quintillions of bits of gibberish that might be poetry or might be pornography or recipes or pictures or who-knew-what that the computers had never been able to unscramble and had given a few that chewed it over too long the galloping jitters. The essential problem was that ninety-nine percent of what the aliens thought worth sending over the Line was trash to humans. But that one per cent . . .
. . . the Symbiotic Spacesuits, that had made it possible for a human civilization to inhabit the Rings of Saturn with no visible means of support, feeding, respirating, and watering each other in a closed-ecology daisy chain.
. . . the Partial Gravitational Rigor, which made it possible to detect and hunt and capture quantum black holes and mak
e them sit up and do tricks for you, like powering a space drive.
. . . Macromolecule Manipulation, without which people would die after only two centuries of life.
. . . Null-field and all the things it had made possible.
Those were the large, visible things that had changed human life in drastic amounts but had not made anyone huge fortunes simply because they were so big that they quickly diffused through the culture because of their universal application. The real money was in smaller, patentable items, like circuitry, mechanical devices, chemistry, and games.
It was Jordan’s job to sift those few bits of gold from the oceans of gossip or whatever it was that poured down the Line every day. And to do it before Treemonisha and his other competitors. If possible, to find things that Treemonisha missed entirely. He was aided by a computer that tirelessly sorted and compared to dump the more obvious chaff before printing out a large sheet of things it thought might be of interest.
Jordan scanned that sheet each day marking out items and thinking about them. He had a lot to think about, and a lot to think with. He was an encyclopedic synthesist, a man with volumes of major and minor bits and pieces of human knowledge and the knack of putting it together and seeing how it might fit with the new stuff from the Line. When he saw something good, he warmed up his big laser and fired it off special delivery direct to Pluto. Everything else – including the things the computer had rejected as nonsense, because you never could tell what the monster brains on Luna might pick out of it on the second or third go-round – he recorded on a chip the size of a flyspeck and loaded it into a tiny transmitter and fired it off parcel post in a five-stage, high-gee message rocket. His aim didn’t have to be nearly as good as the Ophiuchites; a few months later, the payload would streak by Pluto and squeal out its contents in the two minutes it was in radio range of the big dish.
“I wish their aim had been a little better,” he groused to himself as he went over the printout for the fourth time. He knew it was nonsense, but he felt like grousing.
The diameter of the laser beam by the time it reached Sol was half a billion kilometers. The center of the beam was twice the distance from Pluto to the sun, a distance amounting to about twenty seconds of arc from 70 Ophiuchi. But why aim it at the sun? No one listening there. Where would the logical place be to aim a message laser?
Jordan was of the opinion that the aim of the Ophiuchites was better than the company president gave them credit for. Out here, there was very little in the way of noise to garble the transmissions. If they had directed the beam through the part of the solar system where planets are most likely to be found – where they all are found – the density of expelled solar gases would have played hob with reception. Besides, Jordan felt that none of the information would have been much good to planet-bound beings, anyway. Once humanity had developed the means of reaching the cometary zone and found that messages were being sent out there rather than to the Earth, where everyone had always expected to find them, they were in a position to utilize the information.
“They knew what they were doing, all right,” he muttered, but the thought died away as something halfway down the second page caught his eye. Jordan never knew for sure just what he was seeing in the digests. Perhaps a better way to make cyanide stew, or advice to lovelorn Ophiuchites. But he could spot when something might have relevance to his own species. He was good at his work. He looked at the symbols printed there, and decided they might be of some use to a branch of genetic engineering.
Ten minutes later, the computer had lined up the laser and he punched the information into it. The lights dimmed as the batteries were called upon to pour a large percentage of their energy into three spaced pulses, five seconds apart. Jordan yawned, and scratched himself. Another day’s work done; elapsed time, three hours. He was doing well – that only left twenty-one hours before he had anything else he needed to do.
Ah, leisure.
He approached the holo tank again and with considerable trepidation pressed the call button. He was afraid to think of what he might do if Treemonisha did not answer this time.
“You had no call to say what you said,” she accused, as she appeared in the tank.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said, quickly. “It was uncalled for, and untrue. Tree, I’m going crazy, I’m not myself. It was a childish insult and you know it was without basis in fact.”
She decided that was enough in the way of apology. She touched the projection button and joined him in the room. So beautiful, so alive, and so imaginary he wanted to cry again. Jordan and Treemonisha were the system’s most frustrated lovers. They had never met in the flesh, but had spent a year together by holo projection.
Jordan knew every inch of Treemonisha’s body, every pore, every hair. When they got unbearably horny, they would lie side by side on the floor and look at each other. They would strip for each other, taking hours with each garment. They developed the visual and oral sex fantasy to a pitch so fine that it was their own private language. They would sit inches apart and pass their hands close to each other, infinitely careful never to touch and spoil the illusion. They would talk to each other, telling what they would do when they finally got together in person, then they would sit back and masturbate themselves into insensibility.
“You know,” Treemonisha said, “you were a lousy choice for this job. You look like shit, you know that? I worry about you, this isolation is . . . well, it’s not good for you.”
“Driving me crazy, right?” He watched her walk to one of the taped-off areas on his floor and sit; as she touched the chair in her room, the holo projector picked it up and it winked into existence in his world. She was wearing a red paper blouse but had left off the pants, as a reproach, he thought, and a reminder of how baseless his gibe had been. She raised her left index finger three times. That was the signal for a scenario – “Captain Future Meets the Black Widow,” one of his favorites. They had evolved the hand signals when they grew impatient with asking each other “Do you want to play ‘Antony and Cleopatra’?” one of her favourites.
He waved his hand, negating his opening lines. He was impatient with the games and fantasies. He was getting impatient with everything. Besides, she wasn’t wearing her costume for the Black Widow.
“I think you’re wrong,” he said. “I think I was the perfect choice for this job. You know what I did after you shut off? I went looking for a way to kill myself.”
For once, he noticed the pause. She sat there in her chair, mouth slightly open, eyes unfocused, looking like she was about to drool all over her chin. Once they had both been fascinated with the process by which their minds suspended operations during the time-lag that was such a part of their lives. He had teased her about how stupid she looked when she waited for his words to catch up to her. Then once he had caught himself during one of the lags and realized he was a slack-jawed imbecile, too. After that, they didn’t talk about it.
She jerked and came to life again, like a humanoid robot that had just been activated.
“Jordan! Why did you do that?” She was half out of the chair in a reflex comforting gesture, then suppressed it before she committed the awful error of trying to touch him.
“The point is, I didn’t. Try it sometime. I found nine dozen ways of killing myself. It isn’t hard to do, I’m sure you can see that. But, you see, they have gauged me to a nicety. They know exactly what I’m capable of, and what I can never do. If I could kill myself painlessly, I would have done it three months ago, when I first started looking. But the most painless way I’ve doped out yet still involves explosive decompression. I don’t have the guts for it.”
“But surely you’ve thought of . . . ah, never mind.”
“You mean you’ve thought of a way?” He didn’t know what to think. He had been aware for a long time that she was a better synthesist than he; the production figures and several heated communications from the home office proved that. She could put nothing and nothing together
and arrive at answers that astounded him. What’s more, her solutions worked. She seldom sent anything over her laser that didn’t bear fruit and often saw things he had overlooked.
“Maybe I have,” she evaded, “but if I did, you don’t think I’d tell you after what you just said. Jordan, I don’t want you to kill yourself. That’s not fair. Not until we can get together and you try to live up to all your boasting. After that, well, maybe you’ll have to kill yourself.”
He smiled at that, and was grateful she was taking the light approach. He did get carried away describing the delights she was going to experience as soon as they met in the flesh.
“Give me a hint,” he coaxed. “It must involve the life system, right? It stands to reason, after you rule out the medical machines, which no one, no one could fool into giving out a dose of cyanide. Let’s see, maybe I should take a closer look at that air intake. It stands to reason that I could get the CO2 count in here way up if I could only . . .”
“No!” she exploded, then listened to the rest of his statement. “No hints. I don’t know a way. The engineers who built these things were too smart, and they knew some of us would get depressed and try to kill ourselves. There’s no wrenches you could throw into the works that they haven’t already thought of and countered. You just have to wait it out.”
“Six more months,” he groaned. “What does that come to in seconds?”
“Twenty less than when you asked the question, and didn’t that go fast?”
Looked at that way, he had to admit it did. He experienced no subjective time between the question and the answer. If only he could edit out days and weeks as easily as seconds.
“Listen, honey, I want to do anything I can to help you. Really, would it help if I tried harder to stay out of your furniture?”
He sighed, not really interested in that anymore. But it would be something to do.
“All right.”
So they got together, and carefully laid out strips of tape on her floor marking the locations of objects in his room. He coached her, since she could see nothing of his room except him. When it was done, she pointed out that she could not get into her bedroom without walking through his auxiliary coelostat. He said that was all right as long as she avoided everything else.